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Food Is Fundamental, Fun, Frightening, and
Far-Reaching* BY PAUL ROZIN
THE theme of this paper is that food is fundamental, fun, frightening, and far-reaching. By far-reaching, I mean that food is foundational, that is, the system evolved to deal with problems of food selection is the source of many general behavioral and mental adaptations: with respect to the origin of adaptations, food is often first. After a brief introduction, I will expand on each of the concepts represented by the F words.
Freud and Food
Freud chose to frame the clash between our biology and society in terms of the mastering and socialization of our sexual impulses. It seems to me that he would have had a stronger case with eating. Although both food and sex are biologically basic, the need for food is more frequent, more compelling, and frankly, more important in both daily life and in the evolution of animals and humans. Our desire to promptly consume anything that looks appetizing must be tamed by the process of civilization; we cannot grab an attractive morsel of food that is in someone else's possession,just as we cannot engage in sexual activity with any person who appeals to us. Themeal, with its elaborate culinary preparations and social conventions, is a far cry from wolfing down foods. There is actually a more elaborate cultural transformation of our relationship to food than there is to sex. This results, in part, from the fact that we are much more inclined to eat than to have sex in public.
The cultural evolution of the trajectory of food in human life has been described eloquently by Leon Kass (1994), in his magnificent book, The Hungry Soul. He describes this transformation as the change from fressen (feeding) to essen (eating). The dominating role that food plays in animal nutrition is supplanted, in large part in humans, by other functions of food. As Kass ( 1994, p. 71 ) notes, man is the only animal that does not move in the line of his digestive axis-which is an interesting consequence of our upright posture. The transformation, as described by Kass, from food for the body to food for the soul, is redolent with the raw materials that make for a veritable...